Enrichment Fortnight: Bletchley Park

25 May, 2018

Day Five of Enrichment Fortnight and Year 9 Computer Science pupils visited Bletchley Park, home of the British codebreakers during World War II. Pupils wrote about their day at Bletchley and what they learned. Here is a small selection.

Amna writes “When we first arrived from the coach we went to complete an enigma code breaking session with one of the members. I found it interesting and fun breaking bits and pieces of the puzzles given to us to solve. With some of the problems we had to use an app called the Enigma Simulator. It helped us solve questions by using different versions of the possible outcomes.”

Farhan writes “Today was a very educational day in which we went to Bletchley Park and we learned about coding, we also learned about how to desipher and cipher codes… We saw the office where Alan Turing worked, and many other people who helped during the war to decipher codes sent by the Axis powers. There was also a mansion in the park. The guide explained that some of the government came to Bletchley to stay because it was safe and the work going on there was so secretive that one man’s father thought he had run away from the war and was a coward, but really was doing work at Bletchley that he could not speak about, but his father never knew.”

Richard writes “Enigma machines provided substitution ciphers with over 159 quintillion key settings. This is 158,962, 555,217,826,360,000. It was invented in Germany in 1923 for banking and there were around 100,000 in use by 1945. The German government adopted these ciphers in 1926 and they were considered unbreakable.”